NOTE TO EDITORS: Award recipients are natives or residents of Daviess and Jefferson counties.

(FRANKFORT, Ky.) – Michael Boyd, professor and program coordinator of business administration at Owensboro Community and Technical College and D. Joseph Hagerty, professor of civil & environmental engineering at the University of Louisville received Acorn Awards presented by Secretary of State Trey Grayson last night at the 2007 Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship in Louisville.

The Acorn Awards is an annual award recognizing outstanding teachers at Kentucky’s public and independent colleges and universities sponsored by the Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of postsecondary education in Kentucky. Recipients receive a $5,000 honorarium and are selected based on information they provide about their reasons for selecting college teaching as a profession, their teaching philosophy and their professional achievements.

“Kentucky is fortunate to have an exemplary faculty at our public and independent postsecondary institutions,” said Brad Cowgill, interim president of the Council on Postsecondary Education.

Boyd’s believes that the most important thing he can do for his students is to foster in them the confidence that they can truly do anything. Teaching, he says, is a profession of privilege for those called to serve. Boyd’s 18 years of service with OCTC includes 12 years as a faculty member and six years as director of the college’s Center for Community and Economic Development. Boyd also designed the accelerated, learner-driven entrepreneurial Team Leadership Certificate learning system, for which he received the 2007 USA Today Entrepreneurship Faculty of the Year Award from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship. A product of America’s community colleges, Boyd graduated from Crowder College, Missouri Southern State University, and received his MBA from Missouri State University.

Hagerty, a Louisville native, has been with the University of Louisville for more than 37 years. Hagerty says that the principal reason he became a teacher was so he could continue to be a student. Teaching, he says, is a way to share with others something about how the world works, and by sharing, to give them power to change the world for the better. Hagerty is a recipient of the 2006 Trustees Award, the most prestigious faculty award given at the University of Louisville, and has received numerous other institutional and national teaching awards. Hagerty received his bachelor of civil engineering and master of engineering degrees from the University of Louisville and his master and doctorate of civil engineering degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Kentucky’s postsecondary and adult education system is improving the economic vitality of the Commonwealth and the lives of Kentuckians. By raising educational attainment to the national average by 2020, Kentucky will attract higher wage and knowledge-based business and industry and the overall quality of life for Kentuckians will improve with higher incomes and levels of employment, better health, less obesity, more volunteerism, and lower crime and public assistance rates.